My first year at work: I had the fire in my belly to crack it, says Saahil Goel, BigFoot Retail Solutions

Admin| Mar 14, 2017 - 01:02 AM
India

My first 100 days at workI was given an experimental project at Max Life where I had to research a product by Sun Microsystems that enables Single Sign On. While the scope of my work primarily revolved around evaluating the product from a features perspective, I ended up implementing a pilot — right from architecture to internal integrations to having it up and running — all within the first three months. It gave me a chance to be hands-on and deliver something in the real world, and it also gave me a reason to interact with various functions within the company. This went live over the next few months and is still being used by Max for securing agent portal.

My worst mistakeI made several mistakes, but don't recall the "worst" mistake. I was very impatient in getting my projects delivered, and didn't care how I dealt with people. I guess I could have been more tolerant. I believe I still make mistakes and it’s a constant feedback loop to avoid those mistakes.

The best leadership lesson I learntAfter about a year of working at Max, I was given responsibility to manage a small team. Thanks to the right guidance from my manager, I learnt a key lesson in delegation — even if it takes the team double the time to implement something, they can be groomed to become more efficient with time. But the important thing is to learn to get your team to deliver to expectations. Delivering yourself is easy, but getting people to deliver is harder.

How I managed my work-life balanceI didn't. I was a bachelor. My parents lived abroad and I had the fire in my belly to "crack" it. It was my first opportunity to work in the real world where what I did would have a direct impact on someone, on users, on the company's top line (or bottom line). Plus, I was learning a lot — from email etiquette to server architecture. There were days I was in the office at 8 am, worked till 4 am, was back at 8 in the morning the next day. I remember an incident where I literally spent the night in the data centre at the Max office (since ACs are shut down at night, but the ones in the data centre area still keep running!).

My biggest innovationAs Max was gearing up to launch its agent portal, the proposed way to distribute usernames and passwords was to use carbon stationary to its 40,000 strong agent base. However, this would've required a great deal of operational effort, cost and also didn't solve for "in-person" cases for requesting a new password without verification. I came up with the idea to auto-generate an SMS, long before OTPs were popular, to the agent's mobile phone which they could then use on the agent portal to generate their own password. Best of all, we were able to implement this in a matter of a week.

What did fun at work mean to you :

I came to know a lot of people during my time at Max as my projects were cross functional. We had our fun going late night to have paranthas as the Convergys office next door, or enjoying Maggi and coffee at Nescafe. Sometimes, I spent hours chit-chatting about ongoing projects or about stuff going on in our lives.